John Duffy's Fights of Our Lives
are five general elections that he claims have shaped Canada. They are
actually eight elections as he pairs the elections of 1925 and 1926,
1957 and 1958 and 1979 and 1980. The other two are the election of 1896
and the "Free Trade" election of 1988. Only the last looks like an
election that decided a major issue. And perhaps it did not. Duffy
reports that 40% of Canadians told pollsters that John Turner would
sign the Free Trade Agreement if elected. They may have been right.

Reviewers
have quibbled over Duffy's choice of elections. As he gives summary
accounts of the thirty four elections since Confederation excepting
Jean Chrétien's three victories, and sets the political context, it
does not matter. Smartly produced, Fights of Our Lives is a kind of illustrated political history of Canada.

The
emphasis is on the strategy and techniques of elections. Duffy is a
lobbyist who is an occasional Liberal operative with a deep attachment
to Paul Martin. He combines a worldly wise cynicism about the political
game with a childish idealism. For Duffy, whatever the machinations and
lies that decided elections, all is for the best in the best of all
possible Canadas.

By
Duffy's account, in the 19th century most voters were what would today
be called "tribal" Tories or "tribal" Grits attached to parties by
religious, racial or class interests and unlikely to change vote from
one election to another. The swing vote was small. The millions of
Canadians who voted for Mulroney's Tories in 1984 and anyone but in
1993 would have been unthinkable. The party machines existed simply to
see that known Conservatives and Liberals got out and voted.

But
perhaps Canadians just consistently found Sir John A.'s the best
government on offer from 1867 to 1891, pausing to teach him a lesson in
1874 after the Canadian Pacific Scandal. Many of the same voters who
returned 52 Tories out of 92 Ontario seats in the Dominion election of
February 22, 1887 had returned 64 Liberals to only 26 Tories in the
provincial election of December 28, 1886. They must have been equally
content with Sir Oliver Mowat's Grits while he was Premier from 1872 to
1896. With governments smaller, less active and less intrusive in the
19th century, voters may not have seen any reason to switch votes
between elections, while perfectly prepared to do so.

Duffy's
first election is the Liberal win in 1896. Macdonald had died in 1891
after his last, comfortable, victory that year and the Tories had in
Sir Charles Tupper their fourth leader in five years. The big issue of
the day was the Manitoba Schools Question. The Manitoba Act, 1870,
by which the Province of Manitoba had been created, had guaranteed the
continuation of existing Catholic schools. The Liberal government of
Manitoba had abolished them. Court proceedings that went all the way to
the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council had held that it was up to
Ottawa to override the provincial government. The Manitoba Premier,
Frank Greenway, remained obdurate in the face of Ottawa's attempts to
negotiate a compromise. The Tories, by Duffy's account practically a
branch of the Orange Order, had steeled themselves to pass remedial
legislation to protect the Catholic schools in the face of an upsurge
of anti-Catholic and anti-French agitation. Laurier would have none of
it. He said he would solve the problem by taking the "sunny way",
implying that a Liberal Prime Minister could do a deal with a Liberal
Premier that had eluded the Tories. Laurier calculated he could count
on the support of Quebec for a native son and safely woo the Protestant
vote. He was right. Laurier won and was Prime Minister for 15 years.
The Liberals have governed Canada for 76 of the last 107 years.

Duffy
analyses each of his elections on the analogy of football plays with
droll drawings to outline each play. For 1896 he has Laurier playing
the "Quebec bridge", holding a divided country together, while Tupper
is playing a "Double tribal whipsaw", stirring up hatred between
English and French in the hope of undermining a moderate and
statesmanlike Laurier. This is close to the exact opposite of the
truth. Duffy greatly exaggerates the threat to Confederation presented
by the Manitoba Schools Question and passes over the fact that Laurier
made common cause with the anti-Catholic and anti-French tendencies
championed by D'Alton McCarthy, whom he was ready to take into his
cabinet when McCarthy died in 1898.

1896
was the year of the Liberals' original sin. The "sunny way" was
tantamount to a lie. Laurier sold out Manitoba's Catholics for power.
In doing so he did not bridge the sectarian divide that was at the root
of the Manitoba Schools Question. He levered it. He played to
Protestant fears of clerical rule by exaggerating the power of the
clergy and the courage of his defiance of them. What Duffy sees as a
brave liberal stand persuading English-Canadian Protestants that a
French-Canadian Roman Catholic was not a tool of the bishops in fact
played to Protestant paranoia, encouraging their suspicions that the
Roman Catholic clergy were an interfering menace. As Laurier knew, the
Catholic Ultramontane clergy were on the defensive. But they were
useful bogeymen.

Duffy
jumps forward almost thirty years from 1896 to the elections of 1925
and 1926 in a bizarre and reverently Liberal chapter. After World War
I, agrarian and populist parties sprang up in Ontario and the West
sending 65 Progressives to Ottawa in 1921, the second largest party
after Mackenzie King's Liberals. As the PC's in the 1990's hoped
Reform/Alliance would fade the Progressives did and in 1925 116 Tories,
99 Liberals and 24 Progressives were elected. King decided to cling to
power and had scraped through for eight months when in late June his
government faced censure in the House of Commons over a customs
scandal. Rather than face defeat King asked the Governor General, Lord
Byng, for a dissolution of Parliament and an election. Byng refused and
called on Arthur Meighen, the Tory leader, to form a government. No
serious constitutional scholar doubts that Byng was right to refuse
King. Whether Meighen was wise to accept his invitation to form a
government is another question, but, as he had won the most seats in
the election only eight months before, it seemed a reasonable thing to
do. Meighen formed a government but in less than a week was defeated on
a specious Liberal procedural motion which divided the undisciplined
Progressives and passed on the vote of one Progressive MP who breached a
pairing arrangement by which two members on opposite sides agree not
to vote to allow for their absence.

In
the campaign that followed King ranted on about Byng's refusal of a
dissolution and pretended that it reduced Canada to colonial status.
His whole campaign was one long lie and Duffy admits as much. But he
still claims that the election marked a turning point in Canada's
relations with Britain and constitutional development, buying King's
lie. In fact Canada's full independence was sealed by the Imperial
Conference of 1926 and Byng was acting in accordance with its
principles in refusing to refer his decision to London as King had
urged him to do. King then alleged interference from Downing Street. As
for the role of the Governor General, there is no reason to suppose he
or she would act differently today, if a similar decision arose, and
quite rightly. But King had upped the stakes in political mendacity
from Laurier's effort in 1896 and succeeded and mendacity has been a
first principle of Liberal politics ever since.

Duffy's
perspective on each election is that of the political strategist, a
strange breed, who often pop up in the media, as Duffy himself does, but
do their work in the backrooms. For the political strategist the
winning of elections is something largely detached from the character of
candidates, the merits of their policies or the honesty of their
advocacy. It is a question of polls and positioning, image and message.
The strategist thinks he knows what makes people vote and can tell the
politician what to do and say and where to go to make people vote for
him. There are no hard standards by which political strategists are
judged. For them defeat is the fault of politicians who fail to take
their advice. Thus, according to Duffy, Trudeau lost the election of
1979 because he insisted on preaching about national unity and a new
constitution against the advice of his strategists, who wanted him to
show concern for bread and butter issues. But Trudeau was never
interested in bread and butter issues and after 10 years the voters
knew that. Joe Clark demonstrated his incompetence in nine months in
power and and Trudeau would have won the 1980 election whatever he had
said.

Duffy
rates Clark an astute political strategist suggesting he would have
gone down as one of the greats if he had stayed in the backrooms.
Nothing in Canadian politics could be more patent than Clark's
stupidity. He is at it again opposing the Alliance/PC merger. But if in
Hollywood you are only as good as your last movie the political
strategist is always as good as his one victory. So Clark won the Tory
leadership in 1976 by astuteness according to Duffy. In reality the
fractious party could not settle on any of the candidates with more
character and history and had to settle on Joe Who.

Duffy's
strategist's perspective leads to overanalysis of elections. Debates
and ads and speeches and posters that most people never paid any
attention to are carefully assessed for their impact. He knows his
stuff. The story of recent campaigns may awake nostalgia in some
readers and earlier campaigns have antiquarian interest. But elections
were won and lost on the character of candidates as demonstrated before
campaigns began, on what they had done and what people believed they
would do based on much more than campaign promises. Campaigns rather
reflect than shape public opinion, which is founded on everything from
elementary school indoctrination to Hollywood movies.

Where
political strategist become really dangerous is if they get to shape
government policy between elections. This happened with the Ontario
Tories in recent years and they and the province suffered from it.

Duffy's
third featured electoral battle is Diefenbaker's two stage triumph of
1957 and 1958. It was what he calls a "populist rush", which amounts
to no more than saying that Dief was more popular than the elderly and
arrogant Liberals who had been in power for 22 years. Dief's campaigns
did make a difference. Even as a widespread figure of fun in the 1960's
he was able to keep Pearson from a majority. But Dief's melodramatic
oratory was about the farthest thing imaginable from the strategy and
image that Duffy and his colleagues set so much store by.

The
1979 and 1980 elections do not seem particularly interesting. Perhaps
for Duffy just the idea that the legendary Trudeau could be defeated
seems extraordinary. But after the Trudeaumania election of 1968,
another "populist rush", Trudeau was never a particularly popular
politician. The Tories beat him in English Canada in every election.
Quebec kept him in power, giving him 74 of its 75 seats, more than half
his caucus, in 1980.

Quebec
is a black hole in Duffy's analysis. It sends squadrons of Liberals to
Ottawa in most elections and then surprises with 50 Tories in 1958,
explained as simply backing a winner. Mulroney's Quebec strength it is
darkly suggested grew from wooing separatists. The same separatists who
voted overwhelmingly for Trudeau in 1980 presumably.

The
1988 election was the most dramatic in living memory but it is
doubtful whether election strategy and tactics made much difference to
the result. Free trade was simply a good policy whose time had come. It
was bound to provoke emotional opposition but it drew support across
party lines.

Preston Manning's Think Big
is a political memoir, the first half of which covers familiar terrain
in the history of the Reform Party and Manning's personal history. The
second half of the book is what is new, and, to a degree, interesting.
It covers the united alternative initiative, the formation of the
Canadian Alliance, the leadership race that ended in Manning's defeat
by Stockwell Day, the general election of November 2000 and Stockwell
Day's downfall.

Manning
is not shy about presenting himself as a model politician whose avowed
Christianity threatens no policy commitments but stands as a warranty
of his probity and selfless concern. In fact he was a consummate
political strategist in politics whose success and failure demonstrate
the limitations of that role. Far from being a right wing conviction
politician Manning seems to have had no political beliefs at all beyond
a belief in his own unique capacity to manage what issues might arise.
In Waiting for the Wave
Tom Flanagan has lucidly described the process by which Manning caught
successive waves of Western resentment, tax fatigue and deficit
anxiety to carry Reform to 52 seats in the 1993 election. To do this he
had to join in and exploit the Liberals' demonisation of Mulroney's
Tories. It was a remarkable achievement for a party founded barely six
years before.

But
in the ten years that have followed the movement that Manning founded
and for over ten years led and was identified with has not been able to
build on that success. The election of 1997 brought eight more seats
in a larger house and official opposition status but the Tories had
made an important comeback. Manning moved to finish off the Tories on
the day Jean Charest announced his resignation as leader announcing the
united alternative (never "unite the right") initiative. Unwilling to
merge with the Tories, whose demonisation had been essential to his
success, Manning hoped to peel off enough to weaken the party fatally.
But the united alternative, leading to the founding of the Canadian
Alliance was a failure. For the most part the Tories recruited were
fervent neo-cons who tended to push the new party to the right when
Manning would rather have moved stealthily to the centre. And then the
new party, which was little more than new in name only, would need a
new leader. Manning could not understand this.

Manning
seems genuinely to have believed in 2000 that he was on his way to
becoming Prime Minister. He called his campaign for the Alliance
leadership PM4PM. As Manning tells the story he was fearful of defeat
from the outset of the leadership campaign. News reports at the time
had him shocked when the results of the voting were announced. One
difficulty he faced was the need openly to sell himself. He had always
been selling himself. He is at it again in Think Big.
But always before he could hide behind the movement or the cause, the
Reform Party or the United Alternative or a Triple E Senate and he
faced no serious rival in the political terrain he had taken for
himself.

He
says he and his supporters were exhausted from the general election,
the United Alternative initiative and the founding of the Alliance. He
complains that the media paid more attention to the pronouncements of
Stockwell Day and Tom Long, the new faces, than they did to him. He
seemed at the time to keep a deliberately low profile and his low key
campaign gave every sign that while he welcomed other candidates as
giving legitimacy to the new party he assumed the leadership was his.
He could not credit that both old Reform members and new members who
believed that the Alliance would be a real alternative to the Liberals
wanted a new leader and found in Stockwell Day a credible one.

Manning
complains that Day won the leadership by aggressively recruiting
Christian social conservatives. As if Manning had not appealed to them,
if not so aggressively, having had no competition; or the Manning brand
in Canadian politics did not go back to Bible Bill Aberhart's radio
ministry, continued by Ernest Manning until 1989. In any event,
Christian support for Day was a secondary factor. Tom Long, the Ontario
Tory and political strategist who place third on the first ballot gave
his energetic support to Manning for the second. But Manning's vote did
no grow and practically all of Long's support went to Day. Not a
fundamentalist Christian among them.

To
Manning the small advance made by the Alliance under Day in the 2000
election bears out his contention that something went wrong with the
Alliance leadership race. But would Manning's fourth appearance as
party leader have carried the Alliance to a better result? Almost
certainly not. Manning is harshly critical of Day's every step. His
defence against the charge that he undermined Day's leadership is
basically that Day's leadership was indefensible.

But
Day was not an unprecedentedly untalented politician. He is no worse
than Joe Clark. He had a fair reputation at Alberta Treasurer and has
been an effective foreign affairs critic since Stephen Harper became
leader of the Alliance. Wary lest the Alliance should be accepted as an
alternative government the Liberals subjected Day to unprecedented fire
in 2000. Manning never faced anything like it.

Manning's
political career is over. He has become not so much an ideas man as a
topics man. He ends the books outlining a wide range of topics from the
ethical implications of a genetic revolution to the future of the
Canadian dollar about which he has nothing to say.

Manning
devotes a whole chapter and several passages elsewhere to an attack on
Liberal ethics, Shawinigate etc. This is well enough done but rather
stale. It should have been material for vigorous attacks on the
Liberals in the House of Commons and election campaigns. But Manning
was always thinking too big and too busy plotting the demise of the
Tories to be effective at day to day politics. The Tory rump,
pretending nothing much had changed, were often a more effective
opposition than their more numerous Reform or Alliance colleagues.

For
all his electoral success Manning was never able to form a party that
was more than his instrument. When he tried to do so it got out of his
hands and began to fall apart. As Stephen Harper has managed to pull it
together he has come around to seeing that Manning's most successful
strategy, the attack on the Tories must be abandoned.

Even
if Harper leads the Conservative Party it will be something more than
his instrument. Manning's strategy of catching waves could never build
the long term base of support that the Tories have relied on to keep
going through ten years in the wilderness. It is the revival of that
base of support, the return of demoralised Tories, reinvigorated by the
merger and the burying of the Reform hatchet that is the Conservative
Party's hope for the future rather than Manning's effort to catch
waves. Before the Martin juggernaut the Conservative Party may not even
match the success of Stockwell Day's Alliance in 2000. But they will be
an effective opposition and some day a new Tory government. Canadian
politics will recover from the damage Manning did. It will continue to
suffer from the mendacity of the Liberals and the distractions of
political strategy.